Between War and Murder
by Xfioramaster18
Summary: Riven wakes up in a strange place with her memory severely impaired. As she tries to figure out the truth, her mysterious captor works to use her own past against her. Two sides of Noxus clash as the ideal and the realistic battle for supremacy in this tale of two people fighting each other and themselves to keep their honor intact through the harsh military climate of Noxus.
1. Chapter 1

_Are you alright?_

_Wake up!_

A dense purple smoke seemed to pass before Riven's eyes as she opened her eyes and took in her surroundings. The only thing she could see clearly was a man's face looking down upon her. "Alright," the man said, "She seems to be coming to... Can you hear me?" She blinked a few times, trying to clear up her vision. Most of what she could see was a blur, but she started to make out a large room full of people, almost all of them men, sitting at an array of large wooden tables. There was another man next to her with a concerned look on his face.

She sat up, her head aching as she moved. She shot one arm up to her face and winced, using the other to hold her up from the ground. "I-I'm fine, I guess..." she said, "My head just hurts." She looked around the room, not recognizing anyone. The man who helped her wake up looked familiar, but she still couldn't put a name to the face. He was large - not burly, not fat, but large - and he had scruffy black facial hair and bangs that covered pretty much everything aside from his eyes. His eyes themselves were very large and very white, a stark contrast to the rest of his hair-covered face. "Where am I?" she asked, "What happened?"

"Jeez, so pushy," the man in front of her said, "You really don't recognize where you are? I mean, you hit your head pretty hard on the way down, but I didn't think it was _that_ big an impact." He stood up and walked to a large stage off to the side, sitting down on the edge of it. The man to her side joined him on the end of the stage. Some other people she hadn't seen that were standing behind the two of them walked back to the nearby tables, which had plates of food sitting on them.

"No," she said, trying to remember where she was before she blacked out, "I don't recognize anything."

"That's probably going to be a problem," the second man said. He was much thinner and much paler than the first man. At least, Riven assumed he was paler, as she couldn't see any of the first man's skin under his hair and his clothes that were somehow too big for his incredibly large body. "You are one of our best dancers, after all."

"Dancers?" she asked, confused. She stood up, looking down at the two sitting men. She was starting to get impatient. "Will one of you two just tell me where I am?"

Most of the people at the tables were still watching the three of them. "I don't know how much you remember, if anything, so I'll start from the beginning." He turned to the second man. "Call in one of the other girls so that the patrons don't get upset; I'm probably going to send her home after this." She swore that he said the second man's name, but her headache flared up and she couldn't concentrate on exactly what was said. After the second man stood up and walked over to a door on the other side of the room, the man continued, "Do you remember your name, at least?"

"Yes. I do."

"Good. That's something. I'm going to keep going and I want you to stop me if you have a question what I'm saying." He stood up from the stage, lengthening his arm out to the people at their tables. "For starters, my name is Thomas Blueguard and this is my restaurant, the Noxus Royal Club."  
Riven recognized that name. She recognized the club as well, now that she heard him say it. It was a hostess bar. They had a menagerie of women who weren't strong enough to join the military; they danced, they gave the people food and conversation, and sometimes the weaker-willed ones gave special services to special guests. She hated those weaker-willed employees, primarily because she hated weak-willed people in general. She had worked here years ago, back before she had joined the League. It was after she fled from the Noxian military at the catastrophic siege of Ionia. Looking down at her own body, she noticed she was wearing the outfit that the club had as its staff uniform - put bluntly, a bunny suit. She stood in silence, looking out at the patrons, a large number of which were leaving now that their show had seemingly ended.

Thomas noted her silence and kept speaking. "A little over ten minutes ago, we were having a problem with our hextech generator in the back room. You went down there to look at it, and once you got back up here, you passed out and fell offstage. I figure you must have breathed in too many of the fumes."

"But I haven't worked here in years!" Riven shouted when he had finished talking.

A look of dread came over Thomas' face, "Well, you came in this morning nonetheless, so I'm not going to argue with your hysterics. I think it would be best if you walked home now, if you can remember where you live. Call me whenever you get this all sorted out."

"No!" she said, grabbing the man by his collar, "I demand answers!" The men at the tables looked at her, shocked.

"You'll find answers at home," Thomas said in a slow and calm cadence. His white eyes looked even more hollow and empty than they already were as he said it. Riven took a deep breath to calm herself down and let him go; he was clearly keeping a secret, but he wasn't hostile. She had interrogated plenty of people before in the army, and she knew how to recognize when someone was never going to talk. It was her best bet to go and investigate on her own. She had to admit that she was curious to go outside the building and see where she was. That was the first and easiest question to answer, after all.

She walked around Thomas and started down the aisle to the end of the room. The men stared at her as she walked past them. It was a type of stare that she hadn't felt in years, but she still felt the impact of it immediately. It was a lustful stare. She hadn't missed that feeling since she quit at the bar to join the League. She always felt like a prisoner at this bar; not because of the menial labor and the hungry eyes of the customers, but because she was a fighter at heart. The only reason she left the military was because they were fighting for the wrong things. When the League was established, it finally gave her a chance to tell everyone what the right things were. She would be an example that strength had an honor to it, and that victory had to be earned through sheer force of will and not through underhanded had precedence over all else. It was the Noxian way. It just wasn't the Noxian military's way.

Unfortunately enough, that's not what everyone at the League believed. There were a select few that still represented the downright cowardly ways that disgusted her in battle. She felt her head begin to ache as she thought about those people, shooting a hand up to her throbbing temple.

It seemed like the more she walked, the longer the aisle stretched. It wasn't an incredibly large room - it was definitely large for a restaurant, but not humongous. She finally reached the door as her headache began to die down again. She lowered her hand and grabbed the doorknob firmly, turning it and stepping outside. There was nothing she recognized. Just a few trees and a dirt road. She looked around for any sort of road sign or indication of where she was from the doorway of the restaurant, not seeing anything for miles in any direction.

"Goodbye, soldier."

Riven looked behind her to see Thomas grab the door and slam it shut, hitting her hard in the face. It hurt like hell. She winced for a moment from the pain, but quickly regained her composure and tried to open the door again. It was locked.

She turned around to see nothing. There were no trees or dirt roads. There wasn't even a ground on which to stand. Everything she had seen was replaced with a bright white glow, as if she were blinded. She turned back to the restaurant to see it had disappeared as well. "Goddammit!" she cried loudly, "Who's responsible for this!?"

There was no answer.

She turned around and reached behind her, only to remember that she didn't have her sword. It had been gone since she woke up, but she didn't notice until now. "Fuck," she cursed. She tried walking forward, clenching her fists tight. Without any visible ground, it was hard for her to keep balance, especially since it had been years since she wore heels. She sat down on the ground, the outfit's tail leaving her a little uncomfortable. She closed her eyes, but the white light wouldn't go away.

"How do you like it?" a voice came. It seemed to surround her from all directions. She called it a voice at least, for lack of a better term, since it sounded more like several voices speaking over each other at once. The underlying one seemed familiar but she couldn't think of who it belonged to. It was a man's voice, deep and aggressive. Every word that came out of it, even though it was mocking her, seemed to be intended as an attack, like each syllable was a knife thrust into her chest. "I mean, you must like being alone, after all, so this must be like Heaven to you."

Riven sat still, not showing any signs of surprise or hesitation at the arrival of the voice. Hesitation meant that there was an opening that could be exploited. "Who are you?" she shouted forcefully.

"Would you believe you from the future? Or how about the spirit of someone you killed in battle out for revenge?" the voice said, "Perhaps I'm your subconscious and this is all a dream. Have you considered that?"

"This may come as a surprise to you, but I'm not in the mood to be toyed with."

The voice ignored her. "A hostess bar? Really?" it said. She heard the "tsk tsk tsk" of a tongue click and every instance of it sparked her headache into a fire. "You always talk about the greater good and the honor in fighting... But your actions don't reflect that, do they? Is this all that you had other than those words? Once you're forced to close your mouth and shut up for five minutes, you become nothing more than a pretty face and a body." As he spoke, the white around her was penetrated by eyes. They appeared and stared at her from every direction.

She kept her composure as best as she could. "The Institute of War won't stand for kidnapping."

The voice echoed, "I will let you go in due time. I just wish to teach you a lesson, is all, just like I taught you back in the day."

"And what lesson would that be?"

"We are all hypocrites. If you can't judge yourself, then you don't deserve to judge others. Nothing is ideal; especially not you, my dear. I've studied you, as I've not much left to do these days but study, and by saying that you represent the ideal Noxus, then you are a living insult to everything that has been lost to create the Noxus that exists today. It's comparable to blasphemy, I'd say."

In the blink of an eye, everything around her disappeared. She was now standing in a small living room. She didn't recognize it. She screamed, "You can't go unpunished! You will pay for this!"

Suddenly, a man ran in from a door on the other end of the room. "Honey! What's going on? I told you to stay calm and sit down until I had dinner ready, especially since you're still sick from what happened at work." The man bolted across the room and grabbed her, sitting her down in a large chair. She tried fighting back but he was much stronger than he looked.

He was young, thin, and pale. She recognized him. She didn't know him by name, but she definitely knew she had seen him before.

He was the second man from the Royal Club.


	2. Chapter 2

Riven sat down in the chair as the man sat down on a couch across from her. "What's the matter?" he asked, calmly, "I heard you screaming. You know you can talk to me about anything." She tried to stand up from her seat, but she couldn't. She could feel herself moving, but she never left the chair. It was as if the entire room was moving with her, keeping her exactly where she was.

She tried to calm down, looking around the room. It was a fairly standard living room - the walls had some paintings on them, in the notable Zaunite styling. This type of art was common throughout Noxus, especially in the years of the Ionian siege, when everyone was in love with all things Zaun. She looked down at herself; she was back to her normal clothes. No longer wearing the bunny suit was a good thing as far as she was concerned. She looked at the man across from her, taking in his features. He looked a lot thinner than he had at the bar, which was a difficult feat to pull off since he was practically skin and bones there. His hair was long and black, hanging down to his shoulders. His face was very long as well and very pale.

"What is your name?" she asked, trying not to sound hostile. If she was forced to play by his rules, then she would play by them willingly. Her strength would see her through no matter how the cards were stacked against her.

The man looked upset by the question. Not angry or concerned, but sad. "Still with the amnesia? It's been days... I know those fumes at the military plant can cause brain damage more than anyone, but this is much longer than I've ever seen." He held his head in his hands. "I knew I shouldn't have let you follow me to work. You didn't have the proper lab training."

Riven was starting to have enough of the man's melodramatics. "Don't take pity o-" she stopped when she saw the man look up at her, confused that she would snap at him like that. "What is your name?" she asked again, trying to break the awkward silence.

"I'm sorry. My name is -"

She almost screamed. Her headache flared. A deafening roar took over and all she could see was a purple haze as the man spoke. "No!" she grunted, waiting in agony as she slowly regained clarity.

"Are you okay, Honey?" the man asked.

She lied, "I'm fine..."

Suddenly, there was a large chime from a grandfather clock in the corner of the room. It chimed three times. Each one felt like a drill being taken to Riven's brain. Her headaches were seemingly getting worse and worse. "Well, that's my cue," the man said, "I'm sorry I have to leave you alone, but I have work." He stood up and walked almost robotically out of the room.

Then, he walked back in and sat down in the chair again.

The grandfather clock chimed three more times. This time the headaches were even more piercing with each clang. "Well, that's my cue."  
Riven cringed in her seat, gripping the chair tightly to try and deal with the pain of the headaches. "He's just playing with me again..." she grunted as the man finished repeating himself and walking out of the room yet again. Her speech didn't interrupt his choreographed exit. It was just as she thought; this man was just another prop her captor was using to further his power trip. He was still a special prop, though. He wasn't like Thomas or any of the patrons at the bar; he had been seen twice already and for some reason she couldn't hear his name without her aches getting in her way.

She stood up without struggle this time. It seemed her guardian angel had decided to let her roam on her own for the time being. She moved cautiously across the room toward the door that the man left from, testing it to see if it would open. It opened readily, revealing a single road leading directly out from the house toward the horizon. There was a large building at the other end of the road; she recognized it as the military base at which she trained for combat leading up to the ambush at Ionia. She could see between the two buildings a single car driving along the road towards the base.

She gave chase, running out of the building toward the base. She caught up to the car quickly; the path seemed to shorten itself out for her. By this point, however, she was about ready to remove the phrase "seemed to" from her vocabulary. As long as she was in this cell that her kidnapper had designed, then when the world "seemed to" bend around her, it actually damn well bent around her. The car stopped directly in front of the entrance to the building. The car door opened wide as the nameless man from the house stepped out and walked up to the two large black doors that gave clearance to the building's lobby. Despite not being in the building for years, Riven could still see every corridor and backroom of it in her mind. The man didn't seem to notice Riven following him, no matter how small she made the gap between them. She stopped just short of walking into the building, taking a moment to behold the beast before her. The building was always big, but in this dream world it was an absolute behemoth. Yet, when she pushed on the monstrous door before her, it swung open easily as if it was weightless.

The room she walked into was not the lobby she recognized, but she knew where she was just the same. It was the research laboratory. She had only been here once before, but it left an impact. It wasn't so much a laboratory as it was a torture chamber. They captured enemy forces and subjected them to rigorous tests, pumping bile into their bloodstreams until they were little more than weathered husks. She was absolutely disgusted by the way they rendered their victims helpless. The way she saw it, it was nothing short of disrespectful to take away your enemies' fighting chance. "We haven't taken away anything," the head researcher told her when she visited back in her military days, "They all had their fighting chance when I hunted them down." He was an absolute monster of a man, from a physical and mental viewpoint, even before his accident.

She saw the mystery man off in the distance, talking to Grand General Darkwill himself. She walked closer until she could make out what they were saying. "It's growing harder and harder to procure test subjects with him in this state," Darkwill said, "You will do what I have commanded whether you like it or not." His voice was cold and unfeeling, as it always had been.

"Sir, I recognize your concerns," the man responded, standing at attention, "But I can attest that he is still a strong asset to our forces."

Darkwill stepped closer to the man with his hands folded behind his back. "You're letting your emotions cloud your judgment. You're lucky I'm letting someone as weak-minded take this task in the first place." He grabbed a syringe filled with liquid from a desk behind the man, continuing to pace in a circle around him. The man stood in silence and stared straight ahead.

"If it is what you desire, Sir, I will do it," the man said.

"Good." Suddenly, Darkwill jumped forward and grabbed him by the collar, throwing him onto the lab desk and holding him down. He was a lot stronger than he looked. He had to be, as the Grand General of Noxus. "But you still need to be taught a lesson for your initial hesitation." The man's face went dead white with fear, his jaw hung open. He kept letting loose short unintelligible gasps as Keiran raised the syringe to his neck. "Tell me before I make any rash decisions, will this concoction kill you?"

"No!" the man screamed, feeling the needle poke at his skin as he spoke, "_No, Sir! Don't!_"

"I heard a 'No.'" With one quick and fluid motion, he carefully slipped the needle into the man's vein. The man screamed in agony. Riven cringed herself as she heard the yelling, forced to look away from the scene. It was louder than any scream she had ever heard fighting in the military or in the League. Keiran let go of the man and threw the syringe back onto the table, standing up and walking past Riven back to the door of the room.

The man immediately shot his hand up to his neck to keep the blood from pouring out, searching around the room for a bandage to cover up the wound. He glared at Darkwill, his eyes burning with fury. For a moment she swore they were actually glowing. "You bastard! You don't know what you could have done! I will end you!"

Darkwill smiled menacingly, "Excellent. Now that's the way you should speak to your superior. If you do manage to end me - although I have serious doubts you could even hope to, or else I would have killed you right now - then at least the strongest will have prevailed." He turned away and walked out the door, calling out once more to the bleeding man before it closed entirely, "Congratulations on your promotion, by the way."

The man fell to the floor, still howling in pain. Riven walked closer to him. She could see his veins bulging as they pumped the vile mixture throughout his body. Without warning, the man turned to her and scowled, "And what exactly are you looking at?"

She backed up, surprised that he could see her. And hesitation, as she knew, was a sign of an opening to be exploited. In a split second, the man jumped up from where he sat, lifting her up by the neck. His hand was crushing her windpipe as she gasped for breath. The man still grunted in pain, but muscled through it to push her against the far wall of the room. Each tick of the poison in his blood merely caused him to flinch for a second before his rage-filled eyes turned back to her. She could see now his eyes were actually glowing, all signs of life drained from them. She felt hardly able to hold on. The room was starting to fade to black around her. Suddenly, there was another voice from the other side of the room, and the juggernaut threw her aside. She crashed into a desk, knocking it over and hitting the floor in a flurry of acids that burned her skin and broken glass that cut deep into her. She grabbed her cut up arm and watched, unable to stand, as the man approached the head researcher, who had entered the room and interrupted their fight. She recognized the researcher, even in the grotesque and animalistic form he appeared in now, as a fellow member of the League.

"Warwick," the man said, walking over to him, "I'm sorry." His eyes were still empty and his muscles were still pulsing, but he was no longer angry. It was as if he had suddenly changed into a different person.

Warwick's voice was a rough growl. She rarely heard the hunter's voice when she fought against him in the League, as most of his dialogue was contained to grunts and howls. "Don't apologize," he said, "It's survival of the fittest, after all. That's the Noxian way."

The man seethed at those words, "So you already know then? That I've been granted your position as head researcher?"

"Yes. I know."

The two men, or at least monsters that used to be men, looked at each other. She could see some of the color come back into the mystery man's eyes, but it disappeared as quickly as it came, and the men turned around to leave in silence. That was all that needed to be said between him and Warwick.

Riven lain in pain as the scene melted away around her, returning her to the empty white expanse she was in earlier. The only thing that remained from the laboratory was the shards of broken glass that still dug themselves into her skin. She struggled to crawl away from the wreckage and sit in an empty area of the room.

"I know who you are," she called out to the abyss.

The voice returned. "Then say it."

She opened her mouth but keeled over in pain from her headache before she could say anything. "You bastard..." she mumbled. There was a hole in her memory where the man's identity used to be, and every time she tried to remember, it was as if he just took a jackhammer and dug the hole even deeper.

"Have you learned yet? You will only remember when I say you can remember," the voice responded, "After all, if I told you who I was, you wouldn't listen to a single word I'd say or watch a single scene I'd paint out for you on this beautiful canvas I carved into your brain."

"What makes you think I'll listen to you now?" she said, sitting back up again. Every part of her body ached. "You're not making a very good case for yourself, whether I know who you are or not."

Once again, the voice continued without paying an ounce of attention to what she was saying. "You're not the only one who had to hurt people in your military career, but you are the only one who gave up on your own state because of it. The people you had to hurt weren't even your friends. You never had any friends. You never had loved ones. You never had regrets. You left behind everything that had real importance in the grand scheme of things without hesitation to become a loner because things weren't done exactly the way you wanted them to be done. Loners have never accomplished anything with a lasting impact in this world. Everything that Noxus has ever achieved was because of people who kept going despite the fact that what was asked of them was against their personal way of thinking. You were never strong enough to be one of these people because to be more accurate, you had plenty of regrets, but you let them get the better of you. Once your regrets get the better of you, they become weaknesses instead. For someone who claims to value their strengths over all else, your weaknesses seem to define you more than them."

Riven sat still, stewing in her anger, taking deep breaths. She looked up and shouted, "Your na-" She screamed in agony as the headache interrupted her. "Your name -" More pain. "Your _fucking name_ i-!" She felt her entire body erupt with an intense pain. Her stomach felt like it was turning into knots. She fell forward onto her hands and knees and vomited. When she finished and looked down, all she saw was a pile of glass shards in front of her. She coughed up some blood, then closed her eyes and started to cry.

When she opened her eyes, the white was replaced with another room from the military base. This one was much easier for her to recognize. It was her team's briefing room. She quickly regained her composure; her captor clearly took nothing short of immense joy out of seeing her sobbing like that and she didn't want to give him the satisfaction. Once she got her bearings together, she realized that she was tied up to a pole in the middle of the room, unable to move. In a flash of light, a large line of Noxian soldiers appeared in the center of the room before her, with a single commanding officer across from them. It was her old commanding officer. It had been a while since she'd seen him look this young, but she still recognized him. To all who knew him during the Noxian glory days, the mere mention of his name inspired both fear and immense respect.

He was Darius.


End file.
